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Detroit Free Press Business Writer

The final phase of demolition at Detroit's old Brewster-Douglass housing project just north of downtown is in full swing on Thursday. / Romain Blanquart/Detroit Free Press

What’s next for city’s blight removal?

■ A task force that includes Quicken Loans founder and Chairman Dan Gilbert is writing recommendations for the city’s blight removal campaign. This policy report is due out in a few weeks. ■ The private Detroit Blight Authority headed by businessman Bill Pulte Jr. is expected to begin cleaning up several dozen parcels in the city’s Brightmoor district this spring. ■ The city’s Chapter 9 bankruptcy case will proceed in federal court this spring and summer, determining to a large extent how much cash is available to pay for the city’s blight removal efforts.

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Standing between Detroit and its goal of razing 80,000 blighted houses in six years is a set of logistical challenges almost as mountainous as some of the landfills where the debris will be buried.

Among those hurdles: finding enough dirt to fill the 80,000 holes left when structures and basements are removed. And finding enough trucks to haul all the debris to landfills. And training enough new workers in skills such as asbestos removal.

One perhaps unexpected challenge will be removing squatters in abandoned houses. John Adamo Jr., CEO of Detroit-based Adamo Group, a firm that handles a lot of the city’s demolition work, says crews regularly find squatters in buildings on the demo list. He estimates that citywide perhaps 5% to 10% of houses slated for demolition are occupied by squatters.

The city must also decide what a demolition site should look like once the crews haul away the debris and fill in the hole. “How clean is clean enough for the next intended use?” said Roger Homrich, vice president for community affairs at the Homrich demolition company. “If it’s going to be a playground, it better be immaculate. But if it’s going to be a manufacturing site, a heavy industrial site, you have to do what’s appropriate.”

With Detroit’s oceans of blighted structures and “ruin porn” on display for a gawking world, large-scale removal would improve Detroit’s image and future investment prospects perhaps more effectively than any other post-bankruptcy reform.

Cleaning up the city quickly with thoughtful processes in place would have tremendous psychological benefits for residents and help repair city government’s battered image.

Dave Manardo, a former Detroit Medical Center executive recently named executive director of the Detroit Building Authority, said the city is aware of the logistical hurdles and is exploring some preliminary ideas and plans of action, such as creating staging areas to facilitate the process.

“We’re looking at every single activity within the process from beginning to end, identifying areas where we can streamline, create efficiencies, or improve response,” he said.

Perhaps the most challenging obstacle, demolition experts agree, is the time-sapping bureaucratic paperwork required for each and every blighted structure before wrecking crews can move in. That paperwork hurdle has stymied past city efforts at blight removal, preventing the city from achieving goals that were far less ambitious than the city’s current plan.

Titles must be cleared, utilities shut off, notifications sent, asbestos removed. Often it can take months to certify that a structure is ready for demolition before the city can issue a permit to a demolition contractor.

“I think on the administrative side, that’s where a lot of the challenges come in,” Homrich said. “These things take time. How do we streamline the process of taking a blighted home as quickly as possible?”

Impressive commitment

Against those many logistical challenges can be weighed the impressive commitments to the upcoming blight removal campaign. Tens of millions of dollars in public and private blight-removal money have been earmarked, and the combined efforts of government, corporate and nonprofit leaders are being directed toward the goal of a blight-free Detroit in six years.

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A long list of people, including Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, billionaire businessman Dan Gilbert and neighborhood activists in hard-hit districts such as Detroit’s Brightmoor are lining up to help in one way or another.

The city’s campaign will also benefit from the high-tech Motor City Mapping effort that recently surveyed almost 378,000 parcels in the city to determine their condition — the most complete digital mapping of Detroit ever.

The goal of a blight-free Detroit was set recently by Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr, who proposed in his Feb. 22 reorganization plan that Detroit spend $520 million over six years on blight removal. Orr suggested the city’s demolition pace could ramp up to 400 to 450 houses per week by next year from 100 houses a week today.

He said making Detroit blight-free would “dramatically improve the national perception of the city” and “raise investor confidence and effect lasting change in economic growth and quality of life.”

But one thing Orr didn’t spell out was how the city would achieve that hugely ambitious goal.

Even some of the people involved in blight removal are skeptical that the target can be hit.

“I don’t know that the numbers are achievable just because of the logistics of getting the physical title to the property, getting all the clearance, doing all the other stuff that has to done,” Adamo said. “Everything would have to go right. The process is really time consuming.”

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One central office

Multiple public agencies own property in Detroit, from the city and its various departments to the Wayne County treasurer, Detroit Public Schools, the Michigan Land Bank and others. Establishing ownership and clearing titles is a first step. Inspectors must determine that a structure is too far gone to save. Asbestos removal and utility shutoff must be completed before a demo permit can be acted on.

“Initially, it sounds fantastic,” Homrich said of the city’s ambitious schedule. “Obviously, there will have to be logistical bridges crossed as there would be with any other monumental increase in activity.”

Much of the burden will fall on the Detroit Land Bank, an organization created by the City Council in 2008 but that has mostly operated as a low-key economic development agency until now. But the city’s land bank, now headed by Executive Director Richard Wiener, has been adding staff and taking title to several thousand tax-foreclosed parcels it obtained recently from the Wayne County Treasurer’s Office as preparation for the upcoming campaign.

The land bank has set its own ambitious goals, including filing up to 30 lawsuits per week beginning this spring against property owners to fix code violations. The land bank is expected to play a leading role in dealing with property once blighted structures are removed.

Duggan has designated the city’s land bank as the central office that will coordinate the blight-removal campaign, rather than scattering responsibility across a range of agencies.

“I think that will tend to create efficiencies that don’t currently exist,” Manardo said. “Certainly by having one central oversight and coordination and management of demolition activities is something that we see as a very positive step forward and improvement on existing processes.”

Dirt shortage

Once a demolition permit is actually issued, razing an individual house can be done quickly, often within a few hours. But certain bottlenecks can still arise, such as having enough dirt on hand to fill in the hole.

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Contractors currently get dirt to fill in the basements from highway construction jobs and other construction activity. Often, highway crews need to get rid of dirt, and giving it to demolition contractors for free or at a nominal cost is an easy way to do that.

But increasing the rate of demolitions in Detroit by 400% or more will call for a lot more dirt. And if dirt isn’t available either free or through purchase, contractors might have to turn to sand to fill in the holes where houses have been removed. And sand dug from quarries elsewhere in Michigan can be 12 to 15 times more expensive.

“If you’re going to ramp up to 400 houses a week or whatever the number is, you’re going to have to find a lot of fill,” Adamo said.

And while there is plenty of landfill capacity to receive demolition debris from Detroit, finding enough trucks to haul that debris could pose a bottleneck. Many truckers that might carry debris can find better pay on road construction work, limiting the number available to haul away demolition debris.

To deal with such challenges, Manardo said planning is already under way to create staging yards and other logistical tools to ease any bottlenecks.

“It is an extensive undertaking, and you’ve got to get into every single detail and manage every single process from beginning to end and try to wring out any inefficiencies that are in it, so that any choke points that may occur are identified and streamlined to the fullest extent possible,” he said.

Think Apollo 13

The city’s new blight task force, headed by Gilbert, is expected to release its policy recommendations soon.

Steve Ogden, director of corporate and government affairs for Gilbert’s Rock Ventures and a staff contributor to the pending task force report, said all involved are focused on solving the logistical problems posed by large-scale blight removal.

“Even if you push the button today and said, ‘Go,’ it would take multiple, multiple months to get up to full capacity where you’re operating at 100%,” he said.

But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

Homrich, the demolition company vice president, likens Detroit’s blight-removal campaign to the famous Apollo 13 mission, during which the crew of a damaged U.S. spacecraft jury-rigged multiple life-saving systems to return their crippled craft to Earth. Those emergency systems were created on the spot as the need arose, he said. Detroit, in a similar way, can find solutions to its blight-removal bottlenecks.

“Those are all logistical challenges that are just waiting for a reason to be solved,” he said.